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The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves by Brian Arthur

Summary

This book is an argument about what technology is and
how it evolves. Technologies are put together from pieces – themselves
technologies – that already exist. Technologies therefore share ancestry,
combine more, and combined again to create further technologies.
Technology evolves similar to how a coral reef builds itself from
activities of small organisms – it creates itself from itself; all
technologies are descended from earlier technologies. Technologies are not
“inventions” that come from nowhere so in a sense, technology created
itself

Key Takeaways

Technology, Evolution, Recursion, Phenomena

Technologies have a recursive structure and
collectively advance by capturing phenomenon and putting them to use. The
economy arises from technologies and therefore issued forth from all
these capturings of phenomena and subsequent combinations

We are caught between two huge and unconscious forces:
our deepest hope as human’s lies in technology but our deepest trust lies
in nature. These forces are like tectonic plates grinding inexorably into
each other in one long slow collision. The collision is not new but more
than anything else it is defining our era. Technology is steadily creating
the dominant issues and upheavals of our time. We are moving from an
era where machines enhance the natural to one that brings in technologies
that resemble or replace the natural. As we learn to use these
technologies we are moving from using nature to intervening directly
within nature. And so the story of the century will be about the clash
between what technology offers and what we feel comfortable with.

We have great understanding about individual
technologies but very little in the way of the general understanding.
Much like in 1800 there was a great understanding about the family
relationships among animals but few principles like evolution to hold all
this knowledge together. Missing in other words is the theory of
technology – an “Ology” of technology

For me how technology evolves is the central question
in technology because if we could understand its evolution we could
understand that most mysterious of processes: innovation. Combination
drives change or at least the innovation of technology. Invention
proceeds from the constructive assimilation of pre-existing elements into
new syntheses. So the very cumulation of earlier technologies begets
further accumulation. The more there is to invent with the greater
will be the number of inventions. These two pieces lead to a theory of
evolution of technology that novel technologies arise by combination of
existing technologies and that existing technologies beget further
technologies.

Why we are seeing change, innovations, disruption at
levels never before seen – there are more building blocks than ever
before that can be combined and recombined in new ways, leading to new
innovations. This trend seems likely only to continue

The change in vision I am proposing is from standalone
technologies, each with a fixed purpose, to seeing them as objects that
can be formed into endless new combinations. These technologies can be
easily combined and they form building blocks which can be used again and
again. Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry

Arthur gives three definitions of technology:

A means to fulfill a human purpose

An assemblage of practices and components

An entire collection of devices and practices
available to a culture.

A means to fulfill a purpose: a device, method, or
process (combination, recursiveness, reliance on a natural
effect(s)

Technology consists of parts organized into component
systems or modules and some of these form the central assembly and others
have supporting functions. This is a general rule: what starts as a
series of parts loosely strung together, if used heavily enough, congeals
into a self-contained unit. The modules of technology over time become
standardized units. In this sense technologies have a recursive
structure as they consist of technologies within technologies all the way
down to the elemental parts. There is no characteristic scale for
technology as every technology stands ready, at least potentially, to
become a component in further technologies at a higher level

Combination is inherently a very disciplined process
as all these different modules must not only work together but further
the primary function

Just like higher level technologies are composed of a
series of assemblies and subassemblies, they’re also composed of a series
of natural phenomenon. For example, maybe one or two phenomena such as
trucks use the burning of fuel and low friction to roll or several
phenomena such as detecting planets that are too far away to see
directly. But, in either case, it is combinations of natural effects that
we can exploit for greater technology

Phenomena are the source of all technologies. In the
essence of technology lies and orchestrating them to fulfill a purpose.
Phenomenon or simply natural effects exist independently of humans and of
technology. They have no use attached to them. The principal by contrast
is the idea of use of a phenomenon for some purpose and it exist very
much in the world of humans and of use. In practice, before phenomenon
can be used for technology, they must be harnessed and set up to work
properly. They can barely be used in raw form and must be coaxed to
operate satisfactorily and may only work in a narrow range of conditions.
So, the right combination of means to set them up for the purpose
intended must first be found. Therefore the practical technology consists
of many phenomena working together. Technology can then be thought of as
a collection of phenomenon captured and put to use. In its essence a
technology consist of certain phenomenon programmed for some purpose.
Technology can then be seen as a metabolism where the phenomenon are the
genes of technology – they interact in complex ways, converse with each
other, similar to how subroutines and computer programs call each other. Biology
programs genes into myriad structures and technology programs phenomena
to myriad uses

I like to think of phenomena as hidden underground –
not available until discovered in mind into. This is general with
phenomena as a family of phenomena is mined into effect. Some covered
earlier begin to create methods and understandings that help uncover
later. One effect leads to another, then to another, until eventually a
whole vein of related phenomenon has been mined into. A family of a facts forms a set of chambers connected
by seams and passageways – one leading to another. And that is not all.
The chambers in one place, one family, of the facts leads through
passageways to chambers elsewhere to different families. Quantum
phenomenon could not have been uncovered without the prior uncovering of
the electrical phenomena. Phenomenon form a connected system of excavated
chambers and passageways. The whole system underground is connected.
This build out happens slowly as it earlier forms of instruments and
devices help uncover later ones. In this way, the uncovering a
phenomenon builds itself out of itself. Phenomena accumulate by
bootstrapping their way forward.

Not every phenomenon of course has an immediate use
but when a family of phenomenon is uncovered, a train of technology typically
follows.

Technology is not merely applied science. It is better
to say it builds both from science and from its own experience. Science
is in no small part the probing of nature via instruments and methods –
via technology

Evolution works by new technologies forming from
existing ones which act as building blocks. Sometimes these blocks come
from radical innovation but novel building block elements also arise from
standard day-to-day engineering.

Novel technologies come from linking, conceptually or
physically, the needs of some purpose with an exploitable effect (or set
of effects). Invention, we can say, consists in linking a need with some
effect to satisfactorily achieve that need

Technologies tend to become more complex – much more
complex – as they mature.

Domains

The greatest innovations are new domainings – a
switching to a new cluster of technologies. They allow not only a wholly new and more efficient
way to carry out a purpose but allow entirely new possibilities. As when
the provision of power switched from being expressed in waterwheel
technology to steam. A change in domain is the main way in which
technology progresses but a novel domain may appear to have little direct
importance early on. Such components and the way they are used do not
just reflect the style of the times, they define the style of the times.
An era does not just create technology, technology creates the era

Half of the effectiveness of a domain lives in its
reach. The possibilities it opens up. The other half lives in using
similar combinations again and again for different purposes

The domain’s grammar determines how its elements fit
together and the conditions under which they fit together determines what
works. Where do such grammars arise from? Well, of course ultimately from
nature. Behind the grammar of electronics lies the physics of the
electron motions and the laws of electrical phenomena. Big grammar
determines how the elements interrelate, interact, and combine to
generate structures. Grammars in large part reflect our understanding of
how nature works in a particular domain. Mastery in the technology in
fact is difficult to achieve because of technology grammar. Unlike a
linguistic one, this grammar changes rapidly.

Domains are worlds in the sense that experts lose
themselves in them. They disappear mentally into them just as we
disappear into the world of English when we write a letter. They think in
terms of purposes and work these backwards into individual operations in
their mental world. Much as a composer works a musical theme back into
the instrumental parts that will express it. Some domains have deep
worlds with a lot of possibilities. What can be accomplished easily in
the domain’s world constitutes that domains power. So, understanding
this leads to the natural conclusion that an object or business activity
to be worked on effectively must be brought into more than one world to
make use of what can be accomplished in each. But there is a general
lesson here: cost accumulates anywhere and activity leaves one world and
enters another. Shipping a freight containers by sea is not expensive but
transferring freight from the domain of rail into the shipping container
world requires the cumbersome and expensive technologies of railhead,
stocks, container handling cranes, and stevedoring. Such bridging
technologies are usually the most awkward aspect of a domain. They create
delays and bottlenecks and therefore run-up costs but they are necessary
because they make the domain available in control what can enter and
leave its world. We can think of a domain as containing a small
number of central operations that are streamlined and cheap – maritime
container transportation say. But, surrounding these on the outer edges
of the domain, are the slower and more awkward technologies that allow
activities to enter the world and leave it when finished – the docs and
gantry cranes of that world. These in general are costly. Domains
reflect the power of the worlds they create but they also reflect its
limitations. There is nothing static about these worlds. What can be
accomplished constantly changes as a domain evolves and as it expands its
base of phenomena. One implication is that innovation is not so much
a parade of inventions with subsequent adoptions. It is a constant
re-expressing or redomaining of old tasks within new worlds of the
possible

If we can see technologies as having dynamic insides
we can better understand how technology can modify themselves over their
lifetime. We can see that technologies interior components are changing
all the time. As better parts are substituted, materials improve, methods
for construction change, the phenomenon the technology is based on are
better understood, and new elements become available, its parent domain
develops. So, technology is not a fixed thing that produces a few
variations or updates from time to time. It is a fluid thing – dynamic,
alive, highly configurable, and highly changeable overtime. The second
difference lies in how we see technology’s possibilities in its
collective sense. Technology does not just offer a set of limited
functions. It provides a vocabulary of elements that can be put together
or programmed in endlessly novel ways for endlessly novel purposes.

Design & Invention

Requirements start from the key purpose and proceed
outward, the needs of one assembly determining those of the next. A
design is a set of compromises. Intention comes first and the means to
fulfill it – the combination of components – fall in behind it. Design is
expression

Many innovations and great designs do not come from
genius but from an accumulation of knowledge and expertise slowly
gathered over years

The search is continuous, conceptual, wide, and often
obsessive. This continuous thinking allows the subconscious to work, possibly
to recall an effect or concept from past experience, and it procures a
subconscious alertness so that when a candidate principle or a different
way to define the problem suggests itself the whisper at the door is
heard. Strangely, for people who report such breakthroughs, the insight
arrives whole, as if the subconscious had already put the parts together.
And it arrives with a “knowing” that the solution is right – a feeling of
its appropriateness, its elegance, its extraordinary simplicity. The
insight comes to an individual person, not a team, for it wells always
from an individual subconscious. And it arrives not in the midst of
activities or in frenzied thought, but in moments of stillness. One must
be open to see a purpose for what appears to be a spurious effect

At the creative heart of invention lies appropriation,
some sort of mental borrowing that comes in the form of a half conscious
suggestion

Invention at its core is mental association.
Principles often apply across field and at the core of this mechanism –
call it principle transfer – is seeing an analogy.

An emerging technology always emerges from a
cumulative of previous components and functionalities already in place.
This is the pyramid of causality. Particularly important is knowledge –
both scientific and technical – that has cumulated over time

Origination is at bottom a linking – a linking of the
observational givens of a problem with a principle (a conceptual insight)
that roughly suggests these, and eventually with a complete set of
principles that reproduces these. At heart, all inventions had the same
mechanism: all link a purpose with a principle that will fulfill it, and
all must translate that principle into working parts

A technology develops not just by the direct efforts
applied to it. Many of a technology’s parts are shared by other
technologies, so a great deal of development happens automatically as
components improve in other uses “outside” that technology. A technology
piggybacks on the external development of its components. This internal
replacement is part of what makes technologies more complex as they age
but so does structural deepening. Sometimes changing internal components
won’t do, so adding assemblies or systems is needed.

Origination is not just a new way of doing things, but
a new way of seeing things. But it threatens. It can cause an emotional
mismatch between the potential of the new and security of the old. Old
technologies can lock in because of this and causes a phenomenon we will
call adaptive stretch. It is easier to reach for the old technology and
adapt it by “stretching” it to cover the new circumstances. There is a
natural cycle. A new principle arrives, begins development, runs into
limitations, and its structure elaborates. The new base principle is
simpler, but in due course it becomes elaborated itself.

Just as pulling on one thread of a spider’s web causes
the web to stretch and reshape itself in response, so the arrival of a
new technology causes the web of prices and production in the economy to
stretch and reshape itself across all industries. Cheaper steel due to
the Bessemer process caused railroads, construction, and heavy machinery
to changed their costs and what they could offer their consumers

Innovation emerges when people are faced by problems:
particular, well-specified problems. It arises as solutions to these are
conceived of by people stating many means or many functionalities that
they can combine. It is enhanced by funding that enables this by training
and experience in myriad functionalities. By the existence of special
projects and labs devoted to the study of particular problems and by
local cultures which foster deep craft. But it is not a monopoly of a
single region or country or people. It arises anywhere problems are
studied and sufficient background exists in the pieces that will form
solutions. In fact we can see that innovation has two main themes. One is
this constant finding or putting together of new solutions out of existing
tool boxes of pieces and practices. The other is industries constantly
combining their practices and processes with functionality is drawn from
newly arriving toolboxes, new domains. This second theme, like the first,
is about the creation of new processes and arrangements, new means to
purposes. But it is more important. This is because it is a new domain of
significance. Think of the digital one – it is encountered by all
industries in an economy. As this happens, the domain combines some of
its offerings with arrangements native to many industries. The result is
new processes and arrangements, new ways of doing things – not just in
one area of application but all across the economy.

Because all technologies come from some combination of
past technologies, the value of the technology lies not only in what can
be done with it but also in what further possibilities it will lead to.
Inventions beget more inventions as there are more possible combinations,
leading to exponential growth. Even if new technologies can potentially
be supplied by the combination of existing ones, they will only come into
existence if there exist some need, some demand for them. Or, even better
yet, opportunities for technology niches they can usefully occupy.

Other

Ironically we can say that design works by combining
and manipulating clichés. But, still, a beautiful design always contain
some unexpected combination that shocks us with its
appropriateness.

We must get comfortable with technology with
non-physical effects such as organizational or behavioral effects like
the monetary system, contracts, symphonies, algorithms, legal codes, and
so on

All explanations are constructions from simpler parts

I do not believe there is any such thing as genius.
Rather it is the possession of a very large quiver of functionalities and
principles.

New bodies of technology tend to have their leading
edge highly concentrated in one country or region as real advanced
technology issues not from knowledge but from something we’ll call deep
craft. It is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowing. Knowing what is
likely to work and not work. Knowing what methods to use, what
principles, what parameters. It derives from a shared culture of beliefs,
an unspoken culture of common experience. Deep knowings in a technology
can be levered into deep knowings in another. Technology proceeds out of
deep understandings of phenomena and he’s become embedded as a deep set
of shared knowing that reside in people and establishes itself locally
and that grows over time. This is why countries that lead in science lead
also in technology. And so, if a country wants to lead in advanced
technology, it needs to do more than invest in industrial parks for
vaguely foster innovation. It needs to build its basic science without
any stated purpose of commercial use and it needs to culture that science
in a stable setting with funding and encouragement. Let the science sow
itself commercially and small startup companies allow these nascent
ventures to grow and sprout with minimal interference. Allow the science
and its commercial applications to seed new revolutions. Building a
capacity for advanced technology is not like planning production in a
socialist economy but more like growing a rock garden. Planting,
watering, and weeding are more appropriate than five year plans

Human needs are not just created by biological nerds
or prosperity but are also created directly by individual technologies.
Once we possess rocketry, we experience a need for space exploration.
However the vast majority of niches for technology are created not from
human needs but from the needs of technologies themselves. The reasons
are several. For one thing every technology by its very existence sets up
an opportunity for fulfilling its purpose more cheaply or efficiently.
And, so, for every technology there exists always an open opportunity.
And, for another, every technology requires supporting technologies to
manufacture it, organize for its production and distribution, maintain
it, and enhance his performance. And these require their own sub
supporting technologies. The third reason technology generates needs is
because they often cause problems indirectly. In this it generates needs
or opportunities for solutions

These technologies and their needs grow fractally.
Entertainment used to consist of public speeches or shows but now novels,
movies, podcasts, sports and so much more exist too.

Arthur thinks of the economy as the set of
arrangements and activities by which a society satisfies its needs. The
economy is an expression of its technologies. The economy in this way
emerges from its technologies. It constantly creates itself out of its
technologies and decides which new technologies will enter it. Notice the
circular causality at work here. Technology creates the structure of
the economy and the economy mediates the creation of novel technology and
therefore its own creation

Technologies can cause structural change in the
economy and this change is fractal – it branches out at lower levels just
as an embryonic arterial system branches out as it develops into smaller
arteries and capillaries

The more high-tech and sophisticated technologies
become, the more they become biological we are beginning to appreciate
the technology is as much metabolism as mechanism. As we come to better
understand biology we are steadily seeing it as more mechanistic as we
better understand the mechanisms behind it. Conceptually at least,
biology is becoming technology and physically technology is becoming a
biology. The two are starting to close on each other and, indeed, as we
move deeper into genomics, more than this, they are starting to
intermingle

As technology becomes more biological and generative,
the economy reflects this too. In the generative economy, management
derives its competitive advantage not from its stock of resources and its
ability to transform these into finished goods but from its ability to
translate its stock of deep expertise into ever new strategic
combinations. Reflecting this, nations will prosper not so much from the
ownership of resources as from the ownership of specialized scientific
and technical expertise

What I got out of it

A fascinating and deep read about technology, how it
evolves, permeates, and builds off of itself. Some rich language and
concepts to apply to many disparate fields